The Athenaeum

Modernism's Empty Empty Spaces- Michael Brenner

Modernism is something that we all grew up with.  It’s in our aesthetic bloodstream.  We tend to take its forms and modes of expression as natural; after all, it has been the dominant aesthetic motif for a century.  Some of its features are more pronounced, and obvious, than others.  In literature, music, and much painting the common trait that our senses perceive is its jagged, disconnected, and fragmented nature.  Those are also features of our current lives – a case of art anticipating life?  For the artists who were the fountainheads of modernism actually lived in social settings quite coherent and orderly by today’s standards.

The motor force of the modernist movement was freedom of self expression, the rebellion against the constraints of all formalisms.  Rules were the enemy.  The society and the culture that insisted on fixed norms imprisoned the self.  Modern art was at once an act of liberation and an assault on the established order.  Disorder became seen as virtuous by its very apposition to all convention. There is an intriguing connection between modernism’s claim to unbridled liberty and the way that it has shaped the physical environment in which we live.

That trait stands out when our attention turns to architecture and décor.  It this sphere, disorder gave way to clarity; complexity to simplicity.  Uncluttered, clean, spare are the words that come to mind.  For some, such a setting provides maximum room for a rationally organized and directed existence.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, the renowned positivist philosopher, designed and minutely supervised the construction of a house in Norway that was an exemplar of the modernist philosophy.  Every linear specification was realized with exactitude.  Austerity of décor matched the architectural precision.  Its interior was occupied by little more than the philosopher himself.  There are more recognizable exemplars. 

  

Think of Bauhaus design that has so profoundly influenced modern visual sensibility.  Think of Le Corbusier and the regular lines of the omnipresent office block or commercial park that is its derivative.  Think of the bleakly functional Pompidou Centre in Paris.  Think of up-scale Italian décor. The physical environment they have modeled for us is sleek and unencumbered.  It is pale.  The living habitat emphasizes open space.  It invites us to do what we will within that space.  It’s almost as if the modernist motto in this domain is: “it’s up to you.”  There is no dictation of what to pay attention to since there is so little to look at.  The stark geometric alignments offer only bare hints as to how we may arrange the space they compose.  We are encouraged, in fact, not to fill the space with things.  A spare abstract painting here, a bit of fabric there, a slight modulation of color tones.  That is about it.  The unstated message is a powerful one: this is about you – only you.  

This is narcissism friendly terrain – no threat, no challenge, no contender or contention for the imperial self.  The narcissistic personality implicitly rejects all claims on it by opinion, by custom or even by visual obstruction.  The absence of a defined aesthetic order, like a nihilistic public disorder, offers a convenient blank canvas for the socially disengaged.

The age of modernism is the age of self-conscious individualism.  That strong affinity is mutually reinforcing.  The very fact of whom and what a person is takes precedence over how he participates in a social environment.  The ‘authentic’ individual self is somehow detached from any intense social interaction.  Whatever comes out of that pristine self is thereby privileged as being truest and most genuine.  It is sacrilized.  Minimalism is taken as an implicit virtue since it does not ask us to express anything deep or complicated - feelings, thoughts or emotions.  For just trying to plumb those depths can interfere with what really counts: the self-absorbed, self-referential and restless individual doing his thing – however superficial and fleeting that thing may be.  From the outset, the modernists’ envisaged community of free spirits risked materializing as an assemblage of narcissists.  So it has.

(Prior publishing 9/22/10, Huffington Post)

 

Discovering Japanese Scroll Painting- Michael Brenner

My discovery of the rich art form that is Japanese scroll painting occurred in idle moments spent on the web at the height of the Great Financial Crisis. It was a bit of self-prescribed R & R between trying to make sense of the not so brave new world of derivatives and credit default swaps and wondering how to explain it to my students in an International Political Economy course. Looking randomly at Asian antiques, I hit upon these scrolls whose abundance was matched by high quality. Thus began a minor addiction. What I found was less Zen disengagement than a humanism pervading seemingly every aspect of life and society.

Japanese scroll painting is at once commonplace and exotic. Commonplace due to the profusion of banalized, rough silk pictures that flooded the United States during and immediately after the post-war occupation. Driven by the demand from hordes of untutored foreign buyers, and the dire financial pressures suffered by artists, that historic transaction sounded the dead knell for a rich artistic tradition deeply rooted in Japanese society. Exotic because there has been slim interest in this expression of national sensibility. Whereas the woodblocks of Hokusai and Hiroshige have been staples of the artistic commerce between Asia and the West, there was never comparable attention paid scroll painting. A few names from the 18th and 17th centuries, like Kano and Gessen, may resonate among the cognoscenti, but that is about it.

One explanation for this phenomenon is that Japanese pictorial art has been relegated to the status of a derivative offshoot of superior Chinese creative works. The strong Chinese influence certainly is there - thematically and in terms of form and technique. The condescending judgment is a gross distortion of reality, though, that implicitly disparages the superb, distinctive qualities of scroll painting in Japan. Indeed, one can argue that the genre there exhibited greater vitality and originality in the period from 1750 until 1940. A perusal of any representative sample makes its fine qualities abundantly clear.

Scroll painting subjects fall into four rough categories: nature; historical personages and events; religion; and workaday or domestic scenes. The first reflects that deep association Japanese have felt with nature from early times. Landscapes of lofty mountains, most familiar to Westerners, are prominent. That has given the generic name sansui (mountain/river) to the whole sub-category of outdoor settings. Finely detailed renderings of birds, often perched on trees and shrugs, are another aspect of nature subjects. Notable persons and tales, the latter often allegorical, compose the second category. They tend toward some stylization, to varying degrees, in the visual depiction and telling. The figures are not necessarily heroic, e.g. a popular figure is Sugawara no Michizane, the 9th century scholar-poet who is esteemed as the patron of education. Sages outnumber generals and emperors by a wide margin. We find, too, character portraits of anonymous persons identified only by profession or title that convey penetrating psychological insight. Buddhism and to a lesser extent, Shintoism inspired some of the most powerfully evocative scroll paintings. Episodes from the life of the Buddha, Kannon Basatsu the goddess of mercy who is a feminized interpolation of a Hindu or early Buddhist bodhisattva (known as Guan Yin in Chinese iconography), Shinren - the founder of Zen, Amaterasu - the central kami in Shinto eschatology, are recurrent subjects. The best of these religious paintings are aesthetically exquisite and inspiring as expressions of spiritual sentiment. Some are impressive statements of disciplined dramatic effect. The numerous paintings of common folk engaged in prosaic activities are also intriguing on other counts. For they provide a sense of how their lives were experienced among the common folk, their pastimes and perspectives, depicted with warm humanism.

Prowling among Japanese scroll paintings, one encounters intriguing questions and arresting images. Why does a red tinge to a face signify virtue whereas in the West it suggests only embarrassment? Were the artists who show Kannon cuddling a Jesus-like infant Christians? Why is the blustering physicality of twentieth century Imperial Japan so completely absent? How did all those sages gazing at waterfalls or convivially gathered in bamboo groves enjoy the equivalent of sabbaticals or foundation grants? As to riveting images, here are a few: the heavily armed samurai literally stopping to 'smell' the cherry blossoms; Gautama leaving his renouncer's cave in such haste that he struggles not to lose a sandal; a farm boy carrying a bundle of hay while reading a book with rapt attention.

Where does one see Japanese scroll paintings? Museums tend to restrict themselves to the classic period and a few classic artists from the early Edo period. Art book collections are few and far between - over here anyway. Oddly, the best place to familiarize oneself with the genre is the web. Hundreds are available for sale. They naturally are of mixed quality, but there always are first rate scrolls available. Scroll paintings have fallen out of fashion in Japan. Traditionally, they were the main wall decoration in Japanese homes; those with nature scenes changed seasonally. An evolving sense of decor seems the reason why dealers are so well stocked. They are scrupulously honest: in representation (including close-ups of even minor flaws), and the scrolls are quite inexpensive. I hesitate to mention that they are marketed mainly on eBay only because its controversial former chief executive is now running for high public office in California - and this, after all, is the Arts section.

(prior publishing- 6/25/10, Huffington Post)

 

The Sacred Architecture of the Universe- FB Ali

Dear Sidney,

Thank you for your comment on my article in one of the threads. I was struck by your use of the term ‘sacred architecture’, and am going to pick up on that concept and use it to give a brief summary of the argument that I make in the essay (but coming at it from another angle).

From early times humans have perceived the sacred in the world around them, and felt that this quality extended to them, too. That is why their deities, often personifying natural forces, were usually in human form, and why, later, they could readily accept some humans as gods.

This changed with the spread of the monotheistic religions, once their priestly establishments raised the "one true God" to such an elevation that He was no longer of this world. This sucked the sacred out of the world, leaving them, as God’s representatives, to dole out bits of it in their rituals and dogmas. Also, with humans now bereft of the sacred, both in their world and in themselves, it was easy to make them direct their attention solely to the sacred in the afterlife, to achieve which required them to assiduously follow the prescriptions of the faith and its guardians.

As scientific enquiry and rational philosophy increasingly weakened the hold of religion, the newly freed still found themselves in a world that was devoid of the sacred. Thus, today, while the best of modern knowledge and thought can accept that there is an architecture to the universe, it sees no evidence for anything sacred in it. For many people, such a world is a cold and empty place in which to pursue an existence that has lost so many of the old certainties and purposes.

However, it is possible, without going beyond the constraints imposed by science and reason (which preclude belief in the interventionist God of religion), to understand this architecture of the universe in a way that can imbue it, and all that is in it, including ourselves, with the sacred. This line of thought, pursued further, can lead us to derive the role of human beings within this sacred architecture, and to realize that it is to move forward the process that makes this world of ours sacred.

In earlier times, when limited knowledge did not provide a sound basis for rational speculation, the human mind had recourse to mystical intuition to solve the conundrum of human existence and its purpose. The best of these intuitions founded the great religions, but they were buried and lost beneath the elaborate religious superstructures that humans later raised over these original truths. It is only in the case of the latest of these religions ‒ Islam ‒ that we still have preserved (in the Qur’an) the founding inspiration in its original form.

Studying the Qur’an (as it should be studied: on its own terms, and not through the views of others), one finds that it gives us almost exactly the same answer that can be derived from logically extending the findings of our empirical sciences. It, too, speaks of the sacred architecture of the universe, and calls upon human beings to fulfil the role that our sacred status imposes upon us. (It also claims that the essentials of its message are the same as those of the earlier inspired visions that founded the other great religions).

Acknowledging and accepting this sacred architecture of the universe is to acknowledge and accept our place and our role in a universe that did not come into being by happenstance, but through the purposeful unfolding of a measured intent. A cosmos with a thrust and direction which finally brought us into being in one of its far corners through a long evolution from inanimate matter into beings capable of unmatched thought, feeling and action. Our role (which the Qur’an calls the Trust) is to accept responsibility for ourselves and our world, to preserve and nurture all that is good within it, to work and struggle to make it into one of peace and plenty, beauty and harmony, freedom and justice.

No longer, then, need we feel we stand on a flimsy perch looking out at the empty, meaningless darkness of unending space. Instead, from this azure orb, what we see unfolding before and around us is the majestic handiwork of the Creator, a progression of which we are a part and in which we have a role to play.

Regards,     FB.

 

If interested, Download Thinking About God.

 

 

Avoiding The Grandfather Paradox

"Among the many intriguing concepts in Einstein’s relativity theories is the idea of closed timelike curves (CTCs), which are paths in spacetime that return to their starting points. As such, CTCs offer the possibility of traveling back in time. But, as many science fiction films have addressed, time travel is full of potential paradoxes. Perhaps the most notable of these is the grandfather paradox, in which a time traveler goes back in time and kills her grandfather, preventing her own birth.

In a new study, a team of researchers has proposed a new theory of CTCs that can resolve the grandfather paradox, and they also perform an experiment showing how such a scheme works. The researchers, led by Seth Lloyd from MIT, along with scientists from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy; the University of Pavia in Pavia, Italy; the Tokyo Institute of Technology; and the University of Toronto, have published their study in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. The concepts in the study are similar to an earlier study by some of the same authors that was posted at arXiv.org last year.

“Einstein's theory of general relativity supports closed timelike curves,” Lloyd [explained]. “For decades researchers have argued over how to treat such objects quantum mechanically. We believe that our theory is the correct theory of such objects. Moreover, our theory shows how time travel might be accomplished even in the absence of general relativistic closed timelike curves...”

(for complete article including illustrative graph of "quantum gun" experiment, see PhysOrg.com)

More information: Seth Lloyd, et al. “Closed Timelike Curves via Postselection: Theory and Experimental Test of Consistency.” Physical Review Letters 106, 040403 (2011). DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.040403 (abstract only, subscription required for complete access)

Addendum- PDF of the original incarnation of the Lloyd Team paper prior to 1/11 revision: "Closed Timelike Curves Via Post-Selection: Theory and Experimental Demonstration"  Download Lloyd Team Paper 5:12:10.

Further thoughts re: resolution of the grandfather paradox based on Richard Feynman's multiple histories theory: http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-162.html

 

-Maureen Lang